The Art of History: Unlocking the Past in Fiction and Nonfiction
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The Art of History: Unlocking the Past in Fiction and Nonfiction
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Overview
One has to look no further than the audiences hungry for the narratives served up by Downton Abbey or Wolf Hall to know that the lure of the past is as seductive as ever. But incorporating historical events and figures into a shapely narrative is no simple task. The acclaimed novelist Christopher Bram examines how writers as disparate as Gabriel García Márquez, David McCullough, Toni Morrison, Leo Tolstoy, and many others have employed history in their work.
Unique among the "Art Of" series, The Art of History engages with both fiction and narrative nonfiction to reveal varied strategies of incorporating and dramatizing historical detail. Bram challenges popular notions about historical narratives as he examines both successful and flawed passages to illustrate how authors from different genres treat subjects that loom large in American history, such as slavery and the Civil War. And he delves deep into the reasons why War and Peace endures as a classic of historical fiction. Bram's keen insight and close reading of a wide array of authors make The Art of History an essential volume for any lover of historical narrative.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555979393 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Graywolf Press |
| Publication date: | 07/05/2016 |
| Series: | Art of... |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 184 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Art of History
Unlocking the Past in Fiction and Nonfiction
By Christopher Bram
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2016 Christopher BramAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55597-939-3
CHAPTER 1
"The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You"
When I was a sophomore in high school, I had an English teacher named Mrs. Comstock, a handsome, formal, forty-something lady with a stiff neck in a high collar. This was 1968 in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and she was already an anomaly, a throwback to an earlier age. But there was nothing stiff or formal about her love of books or the fearlessness with which she shared ideas with us. She spoke about the lack of tragedy in Gone with the Wind ("Scarlett O'Hara is not heroic"), the pain in Kafka ("Never read 'In the Penal Colony' while fixing dinner"), and the surprise of Theater of the Absurd (when a student asked for the point of a whole literature about meaninglessness, Mrs. Comstock replied, "What's the point of a whole literature about meaning?"). She read us Dorothy Parker ("Byron and Shelley and Keats / Were a trio of lyrical treats") and Lawrence Ferlinghetti ("Christ climbed down / from His bare Tree / this year"). Now that I'm a teacher myself, I'm in awe of both her energy and her willingness to share personal enthusiasms with a room full of sulky, college-bound overachievers. This was superior English. At the time I was delighted just to meet an adult who was so passionate about books.
One day she asked if anyone would like to live in another time beside the present, and, if so, what would it be? I thought this was an excellent question but knew not to jump in too quickly for fear of looking weird. I was an eccentric, goofy kid with a big nose and glasses, a Boy Scout who loved to read. But nobody's hand went up. A few sheepish looks were exchanged, but no one said a word.
Finally I raised my hand. "I want to live in the seventeen hundreds."
Mrs. Comstock looked surprised. "Oh? That's one of my favorite periods."
I eagerly explained that I was reading Northwest Passage by Kenneth Roberts, the tale of a young artist who joins Rogers's Rangers during the French and Indian War and travels deep into the wilderness by canoe and foot. It was my idea of heaven.
Mrs. Comstock blinked a few times: this wasn't the eighteenth century she had in mind. (Later I learned that her eighteenth century was more along the lines of Voltaire's Age of Reason.) She turned to the rest of the room, however, hoping I had broken the ice. "Somebody else?" she asked. "Nobody? You're all so happy living in the present?"
More silence. Finally someone volunteered that they liked the present fine, thank you, and had no desire to live in a time before, uh, bathrooms. Everyone else nodded in agreement.
I was stunned. I had assumed most people loved the past as much as I did. It explained the shelves and shelves of history books at the library. It supported the popularity of time-machine stories, ranging from those of H. G. Wells to the cartoon adventures of Mr. Peabody and Sherman. But I was more alone than I thought.
Mrs. Comstock smiled at me, sighed sadly, and proceeded with the day's lesson.
The truth of the matter is that many people — maybe the majority — don't like the past very much. And it's not just anxiety about toilet facilities.
There is so much past, for one thing, so much history. It can be overwhelming. And the study of history is notoriously boring, with too many strange names and places and dates. All those different years and centuries are too much like math, and nobody likes math. For some of us the numbers alone are as evocative as colors, not just famous numbers, like 1492 or 1776, but more obscure, magical ones, like 1588 or 1832 or 1914. Yet for many readers these figures can be as forbidding as algebra. And that's not even taking into account ancient times, the BC dates, when time runs backward.
Then there are the people who are not only different from us but dry and serious, brutal and loveless. Jane Austen caught this resistance nicely when a character in Northanger Abbey says, "But history, real solemn history I cannot be interested in ... The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all."
There's also the brutal public meaning of the word itself: history as a vast machine of politics and war that breaks into private happiness. "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake," says Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, written during the First World War. To which the poet Delmore Schwartz responded decades later, during the Cold War, "History is a nightmare: during which I am trying to get a good night's sleep." Why think about this monster when you don't have to?
We don't always want to link the past and present. The past is more recent than we like to think. There is comfort in believing that the horror of Vietnam or the Holocaust or even segregation was long, long ago. I once caught an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show in which she was talking with a handful of gay TV writers. Inevitably one of them compared the treatment of gay people to that of blacks in the age of segregation. A young white man in the audience protested, "But that was hundreds of years ago." Even Oprah was stunned. "No, it wasn't," she said sharply. It was easier for the young man to live with his country's crimes when he believed they'd happened once upon a time, in a very distant past.
And yet, and yet — there are many of us who love history and cannot visit it too often. We love it for different reasons. We like to believe it's good for us, but that's not why we are first drawn back in time. I believe history's original appeal is as pure escape. The past offers a fact-based fantasy, a dream with footnotes. Some people escape into the future of science fiction, but others prefer the past. As the flight attendants instruct us before takeoff, "The nearest exit may be behind you."
Look at Northwest Passage. This is the first grownup novel that fully engaged me, taking me out of the trap of family life in the suburbs, into the freedom of green forests and rushing rivers in colonial America. Not only was it an escape into a new landscape and era for me, but it is a novel about escape, where its young narrator, Langdon Towne, flees the New England civilization of knee britches and churches (and a bad girlfriend) into the wilderness. It's not the Eden he expects, but what Eden ever is?
A more recent example is the novel Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. The tale of the rise of Thomas Cromwell during the reign of Henry VIII, it takes us out of our civilized present into an action-packed world of violence and intrigue wrapped in a fancy prose style. It's a ripping yarn, a literary cousin of the reimagined Middle Ages of TV's Game of Thrones. As daily life has become kinder and gentler, people seem to want their entertainment to be more brutal and sadistic. But maybe both Hall and Thrones aren't pure escapes after all: these dog-eat-dog tales suggest modern corporate life, only this time the backstabbing is done with real knives. It can be fun for frustrated office workers to see their not-so-secret fears and desires acted out at a safe distance as spectacle. (The inclusion of Game of Thrones here shows how close to fantasy history can get.)
A different example is the British TV series Downton Abbey. It offers an escape not only into the past but into wealth and privilege. It also takes us to a time when all men and women knew their "place." This is not the simple fantasy one might think. The class differences read more strongly for British viewers, but Americans, too, can't help enjoying life in an age when class resentments and fears were reduced and one's goals were simplified. You cannot feel like a failure for not being an earl when the position is only hereditary. I confess that I identify most strongly with the people downstairs, since their work comes closest to the life I know. (My favorite character is Mr. Carson, the gruff, stuffy, bulldog-faced butler: I wish I could be half as good at my job as he is at his.)
These escapes are not found just in fiction. The reader can experience them in the grab bag of wonder tales about life in the West in Evan S. Connell's Son of the Morning Star or in the accounts of sixteenth-century voyages in Samuel Eliot Morison's The European Discovery of America or in the wry comedy of court life at Versailles in Nancy Mitford's Madame de Pompadour.
Orlando by Virginia Woolf offers a more profound kind of escape, not just from the present but also from the confines of a seventy-five-year life span. Woolf is a cosmic escape artist here, racing us and her sex-changing protagonist through four centuries, from Elizabethan horseback rides to a dizzying trip upward in a department-store elevator. This is the joy of time travel at its purest, where process is the protagonist and the contents merely happenstance.
We begin with escape, but we can't help learning things. We pick up idle bits of information while browsing through the encyclopedia of the past, fun facts to know. Northwest Passage first introduced me to the painters William Hogarth and John Singleton Copley: I knew them as "fictional" characters before I knew their work. One discovers all kinds of interesting odd and ends, ranging from medieval weaponry to Presbyterian church hymns to the evolution of the crinoline. This is the Antiques Roadshow side of history.
More important, the past increases our store of stories. Story is our bread and butter here: tales, yarns, dramas, narratives. A curious assemblage of character, action, and emotion, a story can function as its own time machine, carrying the reader into another era. History provides more stories for writers as well as readers. As a novelist I'd be trapped with my own limited firsthand experience if I couldn't look elsewhere. I grew up to be a bookish gay man who leads a surprisingly small-town existence in the middle of New York City; I have been with the same partner for thirty-plus years. My world is pretty narrow. But by writing about the past, I can expand my range with research and imagination and educated guesswork, exploring life I'd feel unqualified to explore in the present. I may not know everything about Hollywood in the 1930s, but neither does my reader, and so I felt free to take my chances in my novel about movie director James Whale, Father of Frankenstein. Being white, I know nothing about being racially oppressed, but writing about a friendship between a young black man and a young white man in another era, the second half of the nineteenth century, in The Notorious Dr. August: His Real Life and Crimes, I was able to address poisonous experiences I've been spared.
Story is a wonderful elixir for readers, too. We can imagine ourselves in a much wider variety of roles in the past than we can in the confines of the present. I can become not only a young American in a birch-bark canoe or a butler in an English country house but an eyewitness to the Battle of Borodino, or a slave in nineteenth-century Virginia, or a president of the United States. Story is the universal solvent in the pages that follow, the bridge between fiction and nonfiction, past and present. Any human experience should be accessible to story. David McCullough in The Path between the Seas makes the massive, complicated activity of building the Panama Canal as dramatic and involving as a long love affair. Toni Morrison renders the unthinkable thinkable in Beloved when she plunges us into the experience of slavery by exploring its scars on a free family.
This brings us to the more serious benefits of studying history. I really do believe visits to the past are good for us. History is good medicine. Just as Wittgenstein said we must study philosophy in order to protect ourselves from it, I believe we must study history to protect ourselves from its misuse. We need to confront the simple truth that the past isn't as long ago as we think, and it isn't radically different from the present. And we must learn to distinguish fact from fantasy. The American past is regularly distorted and abused by various spokespeople and politicians. This year I'm thinking in particular of the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party. They recently attacked the high school Advanced Placement tests for being too negative, i.e., for talking too much about slavery, labor wars, and the killing of Indians. A woman on Colorado's state board of education insisted we should celebrate the special virtues of our nation, such as the fact that we ended slavery "voluntarily." (She somehow forgot about the three-quarters of a million people who died in the Civil War.)
But members of the Tea Party can get awfully negative themselves when it suits their needs. They like to claim that the Founding Fathers wanted us to be a republic and not a democracy, and that we've lost our way as a result. What they really mean is that poor people shouldn't be allowed to vote. And, yes, our country began as a republic in which voter eligibility was limited by property, gender, race, education, and employment. But the Founding Fathers never did anything to stop the country from becoming more democratic in its first decades, and some, like Benjamin Franklin, actually worked toward it. (Of course, the Tea Partiers assume they will still be able to vote no matter what the restrictions might be.)
Such people believe that history offers a magical mystery solution to the problems of the present. It's the flip side of the fear of history that I began with. Those who think the past is a murky darkness are prey to crackpot theories about conspiratorial takeovers or falls from grace. They feel that if only they can identify the single, fatal misstep or overlooked villain, they will be able to explain everything. They read history in much the same way they read the Bible — as a book of secret codes and ironclad rules — and do not notice that both are slippery, contradictory, living documents.
Often by escaping our present we see it anew, from a distance. We face it with fresh eyes. We see the bigger picture. History can enable us to place ourselves in time, offering a way to see the world more clearly, as if from a mountaintop or even the moon. Goethe wrote, "A person who does not know the history of the last 3,000 years wanders in the darkness of ignorance, unable to make sense of the reality around him." I think Americans are doing pretty good if we know the past 300 years — bringing us back to colonial times.
As we grow older, more and more of us want to visit the past. We overcome our fear and boredom. I'm not sure why. Perhaps we just grow more curious. Or maybe it's because we have enough private past of our own that we feel confident we can keep our heads above water in the flood of time. And so we visit the past in different ways. We do it through historical novels, which can range from the soft romance of Georgette Heyer to the acerbic satire of Gore Vidal to the leisurely westerns of Larry McMurtry. Or we do it through popular history, a misnomer that sounds like substandard history but only means history with a strong narrative. It includes work by literary journalists like McCullough but also by serious scholars like Edmund Morgan, Brenda Wineapple, and John Demos, who've written conventional analytic history but were drawn to storytelling. We also visit the past in film documentary, a new form that triumphed on PBS with Ken Burns and his brother Ric Burns and other filmmakers but has continued in recent decades with a score of fine visual storytellers who know how to use old photos, voice-overs, and music to create fact-based dreams. There is a growing hunger for all kinds of vital, relevant, entertaining pieces of time past.
Much can be gained by treating fiction and nonfiction as different sides of the same mountain. Their similarities and differences can instruct us about how we read history and write it, and how we think about it as well. And they are not as different as one might think. Unlike historians, novelists are free to make up some of their facts, but it's a relatively minor point. Those "facts" must feel solid and established. The reader needs to believe that the story already exists and that neither the historian nor the novelist is inventing anything but is simply choosing which facts to include and in what order. If a novelist changes his mind about his story and breaks faith with it, the reader will suffer the paradoxical thought, "Why, they're just making it up as they go along." There are exceptions, of course, occasions when a novelist wants to change the rules. But most novels aspire to the condition of history.
CHAPTER 2Exhibits A and B: Two Tales
Let's begin with two books, one a historical novel, the other a work of narrative history. We can look at an artist working as a historian and a historian working as an artist. I've chosen two books whose worlds stand next door to each other in time and location but are universes apart in terms of their subjects.
We don't think of Gabriel García Márquez as a historical novelist, but much of his work is set in the past or in a past that soon bleeds into the present. The choice of verb is deliberate. García Márquez writes about a region that has suffered too much history — in the brutal meaning of the word. He revels in the phantasmagoria of history, the dream of it — or nightmare. His most famous novel (one of the most famous novels of the twentieth century), One Hundred Years of Solitude, presents history as a nightmare from which the author is trying to awake. War takes over the middle of the book, a blow to the head that creates a concussion of story fragments and broken characters. It's a tornado of a novel, in which hundreds of indistinguishable events are whirled around and around. García Márquez includes no dates — time, too, is broken — but students of Colombian history recognize the War of a Thousand Days (1899–1902) and the Ciénaga massacre (1928). More than one member of the Buendía family stands in front of a firing squad. The book strives to be an escape from emotion, an escape from pain. The characters are as flat as playing cards, and the novel suggests a long card game in which the author changes the rules whenever he likes. There's a deliberate weightlessness at work.
However, his later novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, is full of weight and emotion. This is the highly romantic tale of unrequited love, a love that lasts for decades.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Art of History by Christopher Bram. Copyright © 2016 Christopher Bram. Excerpted by permission of Graywolf Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
"The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You",Exhibits A and B: Two Tales,
Ghosts in the Details,
Lives and Other Stories,
Exhibit C: War and Peace,
The Macro and the Micro,
Exhibit D: American Slavery,
The Comedy of History,
Endings,